A few months ago, I made the difficult decision to sell our old house.

It wasn’t solely my decision.

Steve and I had been discussing it since the day we moved out of it, but like many other things, we thought we had time to fix up a few things, make it more marketable, and wait for just the right time to unload it. It was also doubling as a space for a lot of stuff.

After Steve died, I had enough other things on my plate to manage and it wasn’t my highest priority. I even tried renting it out for a little while to offset the ongoing costs of maintaining it.

That turned out to be a bigger headache than just mothballing it, so I finally decided it was just time to proceed with our long-term plan and sell.

I was a little worried that the kids would be upset about it. After all, it had been their home since they were born, and we’d lived there until E was 9.

I was worried that they would remember more Christmas mornings there, living room camp outs, fights as all five of us tried to share one bathroom, and a million other memories.

When Steve was alive, it was easy to think we’d make many more memories in our new home, and the old ones wouldn’t be quite so precious, but that’s not how things worked out.

One of the worst things about our old house was all the steps.

We lived on the second, third and fourth floors, so we were always running up and down the stairs.

As I made the final few trips with the last odds and ends down those stairs, I thought about so many things.

The first time Steve and I looked at the building before we bought it. The tour of the ground floor, which was used as an office space at the time, had been underwhelming, but as we climbed the stairs into the large living room with the built in bookshelves and the fireplace, I fell in love.

The first year we that participated in our town’s Christmas home tour. We had just gotten married a few months earlier, and were still settling in, so we didn’t have much furniture or other decorations. We compensated by getting the biggest Christmas tree we could find.

Steve really enjoyed dragging that thing up the steps, but it was worth it once it was all decorated and lit up. I loved coming up the street and seeing it shining in the front window, especially when it was snowing.

The day we brought A home from the hospital. One of our relatives had stuck a big blue bow onto the front door. Weeks later, when I took it down, the adhesive had made a small stain on the wooden finish. It was virtually undetectable, but I never tried to fix it, because I always remember the happiness that that big blue bow had signaled.

Our old house had hardwood floors throughout, and I loved them. Steve had worked to refinish some of them, but like most projects, we never quite got them all done.

This led to some whopper splinters over time.

We all knew not to slide our feet in certain rooms, and I tried to get the kids to always wear bedroom slippers, but occasionally, someone decided to throw a temper tantrum and the foot stomping that accompanied it inevitably led to a splinter.

I think it was the fear of splinters that ultimately decreased the number of tantrums in our house, not any sort of personal growth or maturity.

The giant cast iron bathtub was full of memories as well. There was a small window when all three kids could appropriately get tubbies together and one of their favorite things to do, usually on nights when I had meetings to cover, or was otherwise occupied and Daddy was in charge, was to fill up the tub with bubbles until they were covered and the suds floated all around the bathroom.

On one notable occasion, they accidentally grabbed a bottle of sun block instead of the bubbles. Disappointed with the lack of bubbles generated, they just kept on dumping more and more lotion into the tub. The house smelled like a piña colada for weeks.

As I walked down the steps and out the front door for the last time, I thought about all the first and last day of school photos we’d taken. Now, A is on the cusp of finishing school. His next first day of school picture will be a selfie, on campus, if I am lucky enough to get that.

I thought about all the parades we’d watched, including the 3 hours long county fire convention parade that the boys claimed was the best thing that ever happened to them. And, of course, all our legendary Halloween parade parties.

So many crazy adventures had started in that house. It wasn’t just where we started our family. The living room had doubled as a chicken hatchery and a greenhouse.

The giant pumpkin experiment had its roots there. Steve also decided to distill his first batch of blueberry wine right on the front porch.

At the same time, that house was never going to contain Steve and all his wild energy, and it certainly wasn’t dog friendly. I know we never could have managed to survive sharing one bathroom through the pandemic.

Moving out when we did was the right thing for us then, and moving on is the right thing for me and the kids now. The photos and the memories are what are important, and they have come with us and will stay with us forever. Our old house will move on to its next adventure and so will we.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears weekly in the Times News